A
conservative revolt is brewing inside the VaticanU.S. Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke,
left, stands by Pope Francis saluting bishops, at the end of weekly general
audience in St. Peter's Square at the Vatican, Sept. 2, 2015. (Alessandra
Tarantino/AP)

VATICAN CITY — On a
sunny morning earlier this year, a camera crew entered a well-appointed
apartment just outside the 9th-century gates of Vatican City. Pristinely
dressed in the black robes and scarlet sash of the princes of the Roman
Catholic Church, the Wisconsin-born Cardinal Raymond Burke sat in his
elaborately upholstered armchair and appeared to issue a warning to Pope
Francis.

A staunch conservative
and Vatican bureaucrat, Burke had been demoted by the pope a few months
earlier, but it did not take the fight out of him. Francis had been backing a
more inclusive era, giving space to progressive voices on divorced Catholics as
well as gays and lesbians. In front of the camera, Burke said he would “resist”
liberal changes — and seemed to caution Francis about the limits of his authority.
“One must be very attentive regarding the power of the pope,” Burke told the
French news crew.

Papal power, Burke
warned, “is not absolute.” He added, “The pope does not have the power to
change teaching [or] doctrine.”

Burke’s words belied a
growing sense of alarm among strict conservatives, exposing what is fast
emerging as a culture war over Francis’s papacy and the powerful hierarchy that
governs the Roman Catholic Church.

Pope Francis:
Acts of humility

View Photos

The new
prelate is rewriting the rules in his first year at the Vatican. Here are a few
of Francis’s symbolic moves and statements.

The new pope
is changing the rules at the Vatican.

Pope
Francis delivers his message during the Angelus noon prayer he delivered from
the window of his studio overlooking St. Peter's Square, on he occasion of All
Saints Day , at the Vatican, Friday, Nov. 1, 2013. The Pontiff has led tens of
thousands of people in silent prayer in memory of African migrants who died of
thirst after being stranded in the Sahara. Faithful in a packed St. Peter's
Square Friday bowed their head as the pope asked for prayers for "our
brothers and sisters" who perished "from thirst, hunger and
exhaustion" in the journey to try to reach a better life. Nearly 100
Africans met a grisly end in Niger after the trucks they were traveling in
broke down in the middle of the Sahara before they could reach Algeria. (AP
Photo/Andrew Medichini)Andrew
Medichini/AP

This month, Francis makes
his first trip to the United States at a time when his progressive allies are
heralding him as a revolutionary, a man who only last week broadened the power
of priests to forgive women who commit what Catholic teachings call the “mortal
sin” of abortion during his newly declared “year of mercy” starting in
December. On Sunday, he called for “every” Catholic parish in Europe to offer
shelter to one refugee family from the thousands of asylum-seekers risking all
to escape war-torn Syria and other pockets of conflict and poverty.

Yet as he upends church
convention, Francis also is grappling with a conservative backlash to the
liberal momentum building inside the church. In more than a dozen interviews,
including with seven senior church officials, insiders say the change has left
the hierarchy more polarized over the direction of the church than at any point
since the great papal reformers of the 1960s.

The conservative
rebellion is taking on many guises, in public comments, yes, but also in the
rising popularity of conservative Catholic Web sites promoting Francis
dissenters; books and promotional materials backed by conservative clerics
seeking to counter the liberal trend; and leaks to the news media, aimed at
Vatican reformers.

In his recent comments,
Burke was also merely stating fact.

Despite the vast powers
of the pope, church doctrine serves as a kind of constitution. And for liberal
reformers, the bruising theological pushback by conservatives is complicating
efforts to translate the pope’s transformative style into tangible changes.

“At least we aren’t
poisoning each other’s chalices anymore,” said the Rev. Timothy Radcliffe, a
liberal British priest and Francis ally appointed to an influential Vatican
post in May. Radcliffe said he welcomed open debate, even critical dissent
within the church. But he professed himself as being “afraid” of “some of what
we’re seeing”

Testing
newfound freedom

Rather than stake out
clear stances, the pope is more subtly, often implicitly, backing liberal
church leaders who are pressing for radical change, while dramatically opening
the parameters of the debate over how far reforms can go. For instance, during
the opening of a major synod, or meeting, of senior bishops on the family last
year, Francis told those gathered, “Let no one say, ‘This you cannot say.’”

Since then, liberals have
tested the boundaries of their new freedom, with one Belgian bishop going as
far as openly calling for the Catholic Church to formally recognize same-sex
couples.

See details
on each of the events in the Pope’s visit

Conservatives counter
that in the current climate of rising liberal thought, they have been thrust
unfairly into a position in which “defending the real teachings of the church
makes you look like an enemy of the pope,” a conservative and senior Vatican
official said on the condition of anonymity in order to speak freely.

“We have a serious issue
right now, a very alarming situation where Catholic priests and bishops are
saying and doing things that are against what the church teaches, talking about
same-sex unions, about Communion for those who are living in adultery,” the
official said. “And yet the pope does nothing to silence them. So the inference
is that this is what the pope wants.”

The
contention within

A measure of the church’s
long history of intrigue has spilled into the Francis papacy, particularly as
the pope has ordered radical overhauls of murky Vatican finances. Under Francis, the top leadership of the Vatican Bank was ousted, as was the
all-Italian board of its financial watchdog agency.

One method of pushback
has been to give damaging leaks to the Italian news media. Vatican officials
are now convinced that the biggest leak to date — of the papal encyclical on
the environment in June — was driven by greed (it was sold to the media) rather
than vengeance. But other disclosures have targeted key figures in the papal
cleanup — including the conservative chosen to lead the pope’s financial
reforms, the Australian Cardinal George Pell, who in March was the subject of a
leak about his allegedly lavish personal tastes.

More often, dissent
unfolds on ideological grounds. Criticism of a sitting pope is hardly unusual —
liberal bishops on occasion challenged Benedict. But in an institution cloaked
in traditional fealty to the pope, what shocks many is just how public the
criticism of Francis has become.

In an open letter to his
diocese, Bishop Thomas Tobin of Providence, R.I., wrote: “In trying to
accommodate the needs of the age, as Pope Francis suggests, the Church risks
the danger of losing its courageous, countercultural, prophetic voice, one that
the world needs to hear.” For his part, Burke, the cardinal from Wisconsin, has
called the church under Francis “a ship without a rudder.”

Even Pell appeared to
undermine him on theological grounds. Commenting on the pope’s call for
dramatic action on climate change, Pell told the Financial Times in July, “The
church has got no mandate from the Lord to pronounce on scientific matters.”

In conservative circles,
the word “confusion” also has become a euphemism for censuring the papacy
without mentioning the pope. In one instance, 500 Catholic priests in Britain
drafted an open letter this year that cited “much confusion” in “Catholic moral
teaching” following the bishops’ conference on the family last year in which
Francis threw open the floodgates of debate, resulting in proposed language
offering an embraceable, new stance for divorced or gay Catholics.

That language ultimately
was watered down in a vote that showed the still-ample power of conservatives.
It set up another showdown for next month, when senior church leaders will meet
in a follow-up conference that observers predict will turn into another
theological slugfest. The pope himself will have the final word on any changes
next year.

Conservatives have
launched a campaign against a possible policy change that would grant divorced
and remarried Catholics the right to take Communion at Mass. Last year, five
senior leaders including Burke and the conservative Cardinal Carlo Caffarra of
Bologna, Italy, drafted what has become known as “the manifesto” against such a
change. In July, a DVD distributed to hundreds of dioceses in Europe and
Australia, and backed by conservative Catholic clergy members, made the same
point. In it, Burke, who has made similar arguments at a string of Catholic
conferences, issued dire warnings of a world in which traditional teachings are
ignored.

But this is still the
Catholic Church, where hierarchical respect is as much tradition as anything
else. Rather than targeting the pope, conservative bishops and cardinals more
often take aim at their liberal peers. They include the German Cardinal Walter Kasper, who has suggested that he has become a proxy for
clergy members who are not brave enough to criticize the pope directly.

Yet conservatives counter
that liberals are overstepping their bounds, putting their own spin on the
pronouncements of a pope who has been more ambiguous than Kasper and his allies
are willing to admit.

“I was born a papist, I
have lived as a papist, and I will die a papist,” Caffarra said. “The pope has
never said that divorced and remarried Catholics should be able to take Holy
Communion, and yet, his words are being twisted to give them false meaning.”

Some of the pope’s allies
insist that debate is precisely what Francis wants.

“I think that people are
speaking their mind because they feel very strongly and passionately in their
position, and I don’t think the Holy Father sees it as a personal attack on
him,” said Chicago Archbishop Blase J. Cupich, considered a close ally of the
pope. “The Holy Father has opened the possibility for these matters to be
discussed openly; he has not predetermined where this is going.”

Anthony
Faiola is The Post's Berlin bureau chief. Faiola joined the Post in 1994, since
then reporting for the paper from six continents and serving as bureau chief in
Tokyo, Buenos Aires, New York and London.